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A L S O+.T O D A Y T A B L E+T A L K
Did you know that bookstore clerks can't read minds? Clerks and customers swap stories of illiteracy in the Books area of Table Talk
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THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN HISTORIAN | PAGE 1, 2, 3
What most surprised you about going through all of this research? Because obviously it was an exploration for you, a learning process. How did you change? I became more radical. I mean, I became more surprised with how many of the radical positions were proved to be right. If you take the Sunday Times, when I edited it, some people would say I was left of center, some people would say I was right of center. And on some things I'm very conservative. I'm conservative on things like pornographic display, because I have young kids. What's surprising was how often [radicals] were right when I really looked at it, and how often they were misrepresented, at the time and even since. I mean I'm thinking someone like Henry Kaiser, the great shipbuilder, who starts to introduce medical insurance for his employees and gets denounced by the American Medical Association. He was right! He was right by our standards today. Woodrow Wilson was right, and Thurgood Marshall was right, though the Brown decision hasn't had the effects we thought it would have. It's come nowhere near solving all the problems. And they didn't always succeed: In the early part of the book, the Supreme Court always interpreted the cases on behalf of property rather than personal rights. And how they said that those black-faced boys in the Philadelphia coal mines should be free, at 11 years of age, to make a contract with an exploitative coal miner, and that this was the essence of their freedom. It's bullshit, but it's interesting to see how it's worked out in the American system. How did you manage to write this book, with all your jobs? It took 12 years. If it had been consolidated time instead of broken time, it probably would have taken about five years. And so that's one explanation; I didn't write it as quickly as I had set out to write it. I would take every available minute and hour to read. And I would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning and read and write and I could work until 9 o'clock that way. That's four hours, and I could work from 9 until midnight, when my kids had gone to bed. So I didn't get a lot of sleep. And then I would take vacation time and write. And then when I got Condé Nast Travel working properly, I had a very good deputy, so I could take a day off and add it to a weekend. My employers were very understanding. And then when I changed jobs, anytime I changed jobs, which was three times, I always had a huge gap and I began this book and got well into it when I moved from Washington to New York and didn't have a full-time job. So what is your focus now? Between being editorial director of the Daily News, U.S. News and World Report and the Atlantic Monthly, it sounds like you have three jobs now. Well, I'm not editing any of these publications, any one of which is a task. My job is to appoint the editors and to set the strategy. I can relax a bit more, and the better I do my job, the less of it there is to do. Do you ever want to go back to England? Oh, yeah. I love England and I love going back. I don't want to go back to work. I love working here but I love going back to England as well. I go back every summer when I can, to take my kids and live in the country and watch the English get beaten in cricket. I know how the Padres feel, because the Pakistanis did to England what the Yanks did to the Padres. In your book you mention Silicon Valley as the epitome of American freedom at work: combining freedom and capitalism. The Internet is its baby in some way. How do you think the Internet is going to change journalism? It's going to change a lot in the sense that you're getting stories on the Internet, credible or not credible, quicker and longer, and a lot of people regard it as a news source. The big problem with the Net, unless you have an organizing factor like a magazine, which is Salon or Slate, the Net itself is anarchy. For instance, if we sat around now and we decided we were going to investigate the effects of, let's say, chlorofluorocarbons, that's an editorial idea. We'd have to have an organizing intelligence to direct it, which is a magazine. It doesn't come up simultaneously on the Web. The Web, in all its manifest variety, hasn't got a brain. So journalism, whether from organized centers on the Web or from organized centers in print, will still be very much required, both for organizing investigations in news or summarizing and choosing and ordering the flow. Otherwise, you haven't even got a river, you've got an ocean of flow. When you were the head of Random House, you got a lot of flak for rolling out the red carpet for celebrities and publishing in that direction. And how do you feel about -- Well, it's a misunderstanding of what I did. The first thing I did and the most important thing I did was to relaunch the Modern Library, a lot of whose writers were not only not celebrated, they were dead. So I republished the Modern Library, which is the biggest success I had. And the "red carpet," you know, it's very interesting. On the one hand, publishing is being accused of making the celebrity into a cottage industry, but any author will tell you he wishes it were more efficient in making his book known. And I was successful because I used every device to try to get the work of the author into public consciousness. I published about 2,000 books. When I signed up "Primary Colors," Joe Klein was not a celebrity. When I published "The Hot Zone," Richard Preston was an unknown figure, and it became a big book. What about Dick Morris? Dick Morris always comes up, but it's one book out of 2,000. So you think it's a misrepresentation? It's a total misrepresentation, total misrepresentation; my very first goal as a publisher was to publish good books. I published Robert Massey, I published John Irving, I published all the Modern Libraries, I published "Anna Karenina." I signed up quality authors. Do you think publishing is healthy right now? When I signed up Dick Morris, he was not known to be a sex fiend, and it's just a very good piece of writing. Colin Powell. Everybody says, "You're wasting your money. He won't be heard of in two years time." And they were all wrong. And there's a lot of jealousy, you know. And there's the caricature. If you look at my record in publishing, just look at the Random House list over seven years, or ask anybody at Random House, of the old guard, I constantly buy books of the highest quality: "The Spanish Inquisition," "Lenin's Tomb" by David Remnick, Gore Vidal's "The United States." And I took huge risks on those books. In fact, when the Modern American Library Association chose the best books of 1995, I had seven of the 12. And I lost $300,000 on them, but I made it up on other books, which were more celebrated. So that's a -- how can I put it -- a superficiality.
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